REACTO Test step is marked complete based on oral description before running test

[Hsieh-HC]

Description

I encountered a behavior during a Medium Coding interview where the REACTO tracker marked the Test step as completed even though I had not run the test cases.
Before running the code, I verbally traced an edge case with the interviewer. After this discussion, the Test step was marked as completed.
Later, I told the interviewer that I could not think of any further optimizations and asked whether we could test the result. Instead of proceeding with code execution, the interviewer ended the interview and generated the final report.

I'm not sure whether verbal tracing alone is intended to satisfy the REACTO Test step.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Start CodeTrial locally at http://127.0.0.1:3000/.
2. Start a Medium Coding interview.
3. Progress through the REACTO workflow and complete the coding step.
4. Do not run the test.
5. Verbally trace or discuss an edge case with the interviewer.
6. Observe that the Test step in the REACTO tracker is marked as completed.
7. Response the interviewer that no further optimization can be found and ask to test the result.
8. The interviewer ends the interview and proceeds to generate the final report without executing the code.

Expected Behavior

If verbal tracing is sufficient, the current behavior may be expected.
If the Test step is intended to require actual code execution, it should remain incomplete until the interviewee successfully runs the tests.

Actual Behavior

The Test step was marked as completed before the code was executed.
The generated interview report records the Test phase as observed based on candidate_speech after I verbally traced an edge case.

Then I explicitly asked whether we could test the result, but the interviewer instead concluded the interview and generated the final report.

Environment

• OS: Windows 11
• Architecture: x64
• Browser: Chrome
• Access method: http://127.0.0.1:3000/

[Hipsterthomas]

I encountered a similar behavior during a 30-minute CodeTrial interview using C on macOS.

In my session, I verbally walked through the frequency-counting logic and example cases, but I had not yet confirmed the implementation by actually executing the code against the test cases.

However, the generated report recorded the Test phase as:

test 14:28 · observed · candidate_speech · 100% confidence · v1

Candidate walked through example cases, clarifying their logic for character
frequency counting and comparison.

This seems consistent with the behavior described in this issue: a verbal walkthrough can be treated as evidence for the REACTO Test phase even though no actual test execution has occurred.

In my case, this behavior was independently observed on a different platform from the original report.

Environment:

OS: macOS
Architecture: Apple Silicon (aarch64)
Language: C
Interview duration: 30 minutes
Problem: ransom-note / Marquee Letter Tiles

It may be useful to distinguish between:

1. manually tracing or predicting test cases, and
2. actually executing the implementation and receiving test results

when determining whether the REACTO Test phase should be considered complete.